Aguro

I have written on my old blog about how important it is to practice kanji writing using Mnemosyne. Here I will describe the process in more detail, not about the way questions are crafted (that’s for another post) but about the physical process of it.

The basic equipments are a pen and a book. I prefer books with Cartesian lines in it but a more common horizontal-line-only book works fine.

I see squares

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WOLF RPG Editor (WOLF RPGエディター) is a Japanese program to make 2D RPG games like Final Fantasy. The editor itself includes a sample game which can be finished in quite a short amount of time:

ちょっと食べていかないかい？
Won’t you taste my cuisine?

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Novel reading - 月下の恋人たち #1 - Lovers under the moonlight

I’m still on the 2nd chapter. An interesting expression I found is 耳にする which means to hear:

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I have this book borrowed from my cousin, Routledge’s “Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar” (Stefan Kaiser et. al.), which has been tremendously useful for my Japanese studies.

It’s a quite nicely organized grammar collection. For every grammar entry, after an explanation there will be wealth of example sentences each with their kanji, romaji, and English translation. Here’s one example sentence under the entry about the classical copula なり (なる in its noun-modifying form):

I use it to look up new confusing grammars I find while reading, but most importantly, I try to exhaustively read it from the start to beginning with the method I will outline.

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It’s good to be healthy again, because that means we can start learning Japanese again

Novel reading - 月下の恋人たち #2 - Lovers under the moonlight

I’m still on chapter two. Believe me, the chapters are incredibly long. I found a rare grammar here, the ばかり to indicate as if someone might do something!

In the scene, the protagonist was talking to another person through a window:

There are only two new kanji on that chapter

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I got sick, so I wouldn’t be able to update this blog for probably several days. Let’s just hope things will get sorted out soon.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

It’s time for another word and kanji dump, which is somewhat a recap of all the incremental Oyasumis! The last one was at May 25th, so let’s see my quantifiable progress for this one month or so period.

I’ve gathered 36 new kanji and 153 new Japanese words. This totals to 2,692 kanji and 11,185 words. Wow, I’m slowly but surely approaching the magic 3,000 mark! When I reach it, I’ll commemorate it by posting my kanji progress graph so stay tuned!

Anyway, when I did some checking I was surprised that my kanji list had some kanji categorized on the wrong grade! For example, the kanji 誤 (mistake) which actually should be in grade 6 was placed on my grade 8 list! I then put the wrong ones to its proper place and… surprise!!! It turned out that I had all the grade 5 kanji memorized since heaven knows when! For grade 6, I still have 2 kanji remaining :).

Now let’s highlight my source of materials. As always, many come from the example sentences of Yahoo! Jisho. The Japanese Wikipedia articles that contributed to this dump are ラッカセイ (rakkasei, peanut), エジソン (ejison, Thomas Alva Edison), 第二次世界大戦 (dai-ni-ji sekai taisen, WWII), and コールラビ (koorurabi, kohlrabi). Also I got lots of words from the game マシンケン　暗黒の谷 (mashinken ankoku no tani, Mashinken (devil sword?) - Valley of Darkness) of the UUE minigame collection. Other than that, among other things they’re from real books I have, jpod101, and the novel 「薬草を探せ」 - 光の戦士 まやちゃん 物語 その1.

If I had to pick a favorite kanji from this period, it’s 轢く (hiku) which means “to run somebody over (with vehicle)”. The kanji is evil from its root, composed of 車 (car) and 樂 (fun, a funky version of 楽). So the creator thought that running people over with a car is fun!!!

Here are the kanji:

朗赦蛍倹錠樺猪葵蝶鶯傭黴叢唸梟蛙茹蒡痕痔捗姦炒頓桁棍薙雉樂轢圃棘囮褪腫揉

And the words:

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